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About Nick Mills

Full disclosure: I was not born in Maine, alas! I was born in Massachusetts, but the family moved to Maine when I was eleven, and I grew up in Thomaston. My dad was skipper of one of the draggers that sailed out of Rockland, in the days when it was a rough-tough working fishing port. When he came in from the sea his favorite activity was freshwater fishing with me and my brother, Peter. We learned together to flyfish for trout in the Alder Stream in Eustis. Once hooked on the sport, pun intended, I fished at every opportunity in every place I could -- in the rivers, streams and ponds of Maine; in the mountain ponds of Utah, where I was stationed for a year in the Army; in high Andean lakes in Colombia, where I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer; even in a lagoon that surrounded one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. I tried once to go trout fishing in northern Afghanistan, when the U.S.S.R. occupied that country; a landslide blocked my path, but that led to a more interesting adventure, which I will tell you about in a future post.

Up to camp during the Dog Days. Siriusly. I recruited (without any trouble, frankly) friend Lou Ureneck to join me. I warned him that the fishing would be poor-to-really-poor, which did not discourage him, which was good because I really wanted him there for other reasons. Lou is the esteemed former editor of the Portland […]

Einstein. Pretty smart guy, right? In Maine, were he alive today, he’d qualify as wicked smart. I mean, he came up with that amazing formula that explains just about everything: e=mc². I think the e stands for everything. Everything equals mass times speed. Squared. Brilliant. So why am I talking about Al Einstein, brilliant and […]

…always a blackfly, no matter where I go I’ll die with a blackfly pickin’ my bones In north On-tar-i-o, in north On-tar-io. (From “Blackfly,” an animated film from the archive of the National Film Board of Canada) Ah, yes. It’s time for the annual blackfly post. In Spring, a young angler’s fancy turns to stark […]

I made my inaugural splash into the 2018 trout season on Monday with my usual flair. I caught three trees, two of them pretty good sized. The spool fell out of my reel while I was trying to remember how to cast; fortunately it fell into shallow water where I could retrieve it and properly […]

At the Maine State Prison Showroom in Thomaston you can purchase for your kitchen a sturdy butcher-block cutting board, but not a knife. The store sells bookcases, dressers, tables, toys, games, birdhouses, gadgets, gizmos and works of art, all handcrafted, all of wood. Your salesman is a prison inmate but you give your money to […]

(The Virtual Angler has been in hibernation but has been roused from his slumber by the distant sound of bat striking ball and the unmistakable scent of Spring in the air.) The day after the shock of Super Bowl LII plunged Patriot Nation into a darkness deeper than a CMP blackout, the sun rose at […]

Anglers are forever being asked by non-anglers, “Why do you fish?” They ask it in the tone of voice they might use when picking up a dead mouse, as though it were some disfigurement or character flaw. We anglers have a hard time answering the question, because we cannot fathom how another homo sapiens could […]

When I first started doing it I did it every chance I got. My father saw me doing it and warned me that if I kept it up I’d go blind. We’re talking, of course, about tying flies. Fly-tyers have been around for a long, long time. Forget about the revered Isaak Walton, the 17th […]

What New Year’s Eve is really for is not so much to celebrate the arrival of a new year as to blow off the steam accumulated in your boiler under the terrible pressure of Christmas. Yeah, sure, Auld Lange Syne and all that, but the auld acquaintance we’re trying to put in the rear view […]

When a-fishing I will go, I will pull on my jeans, the ones that are too stained and tattered to wear in polite society; or maybe an old pair of paint-splashed cotton cargo pants, the ones with so many pockets that a search for my car keys becomes a minor expedition; or, if it’s chilly, […]

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Nick Mills

Full disclosure: I was not born in Maine, alas! I was born in Massachusetts, but the family moved to Maine when I was eleven, and I grew up in Thomaston. My dad was skipper of one of the draggers that sailed out of Rockland, in the days when it was a rough-tough working fishing port. When he came in from the sea his favorite activity was freshwater fishing with me and my brother, Peter. We learned together to flyfish for trout in the Alder Stream in Eustis. Once hooked on the sport, pun intended, I fished at every opportunity in every place I could -- in the rivers, streams and ponds of Maine; in the mountain ponds of Utah, where I was stationed for a year in the Army; in high Andean lakes in Colombia, where I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer; even in a lagoon that surrounded one of Saddam Hussein's palaces in Baghdad. I tried once to go trout fishing in northern Afghanistan, when the U.S.S.R. occupied that country; a landslide blocked my path, but that led to a more interesting adventure, which I will tell you about in a future post.